Omicron is dominating the news everywhere. Makes sense. It’s new and it’s out there and it’s still a mystery. However, the fact that it’s a mystery cuts both ways. It makes articles more compelling (who doesn’t like a myster?) yet it’s a significant weakness. It’s still early days and scientists are still engaged in the first round of Omnicron-inspired research. Still, the information is beginning to trickle in. Nature has a roundup of what we know so far about the latest coronavirus strain. https://go.nature.com/3xS9MKj

Sometimes, there are things in the news that are so absurd that you question its veracity. A story coming out of Italy falls under that category. Per the Guardian, “An Italian man is facing charges of fraud after turning up for his Covid-19 vaccine wearing a fake arm. So determined was he to dodge the jab but still obtain a health pass, the anti-vaxxer may have paid hundreds of euros for the silicone prosthetic. The bizarre episode at a vaccine hub in Biella, a town close to Turin in the northern Piedmont region, came a week after Italy announced measures barring unvaccinated people from a host of social, cultural and sporting activities.” You really need to question people’s common sense sometimes. https://bit.ly/3DphWe6

The march towards impenetrable space congestion made another leap forward thanks to Elon Musk and his reusable rocket company. According to space.com, “SpaceX just launched the first of four planned Falcon 9 rocket launches this month, with its workhorse rocket carrying a stack of 48 Starlink satellites and two BlackSky Earth observation satellites into orbit, before sticking a booster landing at sea. The previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:12 p.m. EST (2312 GMT), marking this particular booster’s ninth flight.”  https://bit.ly/3lyhMef

If recent times has taught us anything about society, it’s that there aren’t any limits to what can be weaponized and used against anyone. Recently, food has been weaponized in South Asia. According to France24 “India’s Muslim community is often targeted with disinformation by Hindu nationalists and falsely accused online of various crimes. The latest accusation to surface on social media is that Muslims are carrying out ‘rice jihad’. But what is ‘rice jihad’? We take a look in this week’s episode of Truth or Fake.” Needless to say, the news is pure propaganda. https://bit.ly/3Gc1LCJ

And now for a bit of good news to take us into the weekend, scientists have taken a big step towards combating racism. Per Science, “Human geneticists have mostly abandoned the word “race” when describing populations in their papers, according to a new study of research published in a leading genetics journal. That’s in line with the current scientific understanding that race is a social construct, and a welcome departure from research that in the past has often conflated genetic variation and racial categories, says Vence Bonham, a social scientist at the National Human Genome Research Institute who led the study. But alternative terms that have gained popularity, such as “ancestry” and “ethnicity,” can have ambiguous meanings or aren’t defined by genetics, suggesting researchers are still struggling to find the words to accurately describe groups delineated by their DNA, according to the study.” If the scientific community, i.e. people who know a thing or two about taxonomy, begin to deny the scientific existence of race, it is bound to make its way into the popular psyche. That said, radical-right-wing know-it-alls will probably bemoan the move as just another example of “wokeness”. https://bit.ly/3prlWpl

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend. Let’s be careful out there.